About

Statement of Purpose

Dósis is an online blog and magazine dedicated to exploring the intersection of medical humanities and social justice. The web-only publication offers three issues annually featuring essays, commentary, and reviews clustered around a particular theme. In addition, the blog will run news and notes on relevant current trends in medical humanities and social justice.

About Us

Who are we? Brandy Schillace, founding editor, works in public engagement and outreach for museums, inviting a diverse audience to see themselves as partners in a wider community. She also serves as Editor for BMJ’s Medical Humanities journal. The remaining staff come from varied backgrounds, but each of us have a commitment to issues of access.

Our authors and audience? We welcome submissions from students, volunteers, social justice warriors, queer theorists, public health policymakers, teachers, scholars, practitioners, patients, artists and Jane Q Public whose research or experience speaks to the relationship between medical humanities and social justice. We welcome every background, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation and creed. Though we welcome academic inquiry, we intend this magazine for a general reading public. Contributors do not need an institutional affiliation or degree to be considered.

What we offer? We created this platform to provide a space for voices not always heard in academic medical humanities, and further, to bring the discussion beyond the university and into lived experience. While Dósis is currently unable to pay its contributors, writers are given a byline and retain copyright and republication rights to all of their content. We welcome you, also, to be part of how we shape this project and our process.

Submissions

Dósis puts out three calls annually for contributions to our Winter/Spring, Summer, and Fall issues. These calls outline the theme for a given issue and provide specific deadlines for essay and commentary pitches as well as suggestions for works to review. Read Dósis online.

Dósis considers three types of submissions:

Essays are between 1000-1500 words in length and grounded in the writer’s area of scholarly expertise, work in the field, or experience as an activist. Essays may also be in conversation or interview format with a scholar or practitioner.

Commentary pieces are 300-500 words in length and are more informal opinion pieces that speak to current events and the issue’s specific theme. Commentary may also be reflection on an event such as a conference session or public lecture that is relevant to the issue’s focus.

Reviews are expected to be 500-750 words in length, providing an overview of the work, its goals, and the reviewer’s estimation of its success.

Cover Art submissions in all visual art formats are considered.

Dósis Online

As you may already be aware, Patreon has recently decided to change its fee structure. Whereas previously, patrons paid exactly what they pledged and the service fee was deducted from the creator’s income, moving forward Patreon plans to charge you, the patrons, a 2.9% + $0.35 processing fee for each pledge. This means, for example, …

Review by Veronica Tomasic. “For me, it’s not about how long you live but about how you live” (83). In end-of-life discussions, we sometimes let our personal ideas about “quality-of-life” and “suffering” dictate when considering whether a patient should forgo medical treatment and begin hospice care. Reading It’s Not Yet Dark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) …

We will not accept the treatment of minority groups as though they are the “problem.” — This morning, the President of the United States has reposted Islamophobic videos from Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of Britain First, a far-right extremist group that aligns itself with white ultranationalism. The videos have long been outed as fake, hate-filled …

Submission and Style

Submission and Style Guidelines

Dósis puts out three calls annually for contributions to our Winter/Spring, Summer, and Fall issues. These calls outline the theme for a given issue and provide specific deadlines for essay and commentary pitches as well as suggestions for works to review.

Essays are between 1000-1500 words in length and grounded in the writer’s area of scholarly expertise, work in the field, or experience as an activist. Essays may also be in conversation or interview format with a scholar or practitioner.

Commentary pieces are 300-500 words in length and are more informal opinion pieces that speak to current events and the issue’s specific theme. Commentary may also be reflection on an event such as a conference session or public lecture that is relevant to the issue’s focus.

Reviews are expected to be 500-750 words in length, providing an overview of the work, its goals, and the reviewer’s estimation of its success.

Style Guide

Length: Between 300-700 words. This is an extremely flexible limit and longer pieces can be broken into multiple posts.

Links: Indicate links in the text as follows: “This will be a link [http://www.example.com]”

Images: Please use a maximum of three (unless they are thumbnails); send .jpg images or links to images online to the series editor. Medium or small images (approximately 500 x 400 pixels or less) will look best. Indicate placement in the text in whatever manner you wish. Image slideshows can be included in a post if more than three large images are wanted. Note: the author is responsible for clarifying the ownership or copyright of the pictures. We compiled a list of resources where you can find photos that are in the public domain: Europeana, DPLA, NLM, Flickr, LoC, Yale, Wellcome Images, Wikimedia, creative commons.

Audio/video: Both audio and video files can be embedded in a post. Please send the file to the series editor for inclusion. Indicate placement in the text in whatever manner you wish.

Captions: Please include a brief caption for images, audio, and video, including whatever rights or attribution information is relevant.

Author: Please send a one to three sentence biography of the author for use in the WordPress format.

Areas of interest: We invite guest posts to respond to our CFPs, and to share perspectives about medicine, medical history, health and humanities through a social justice lens. We welcome anthropological and sociological accounts that speak to themes of access, social welfare, cultural and historical practice. Current events are also welcome, and we particularly like to see posts about the under-served. We also welcome posts concerning the medhum aspects of museum and library collections, physical and digital. For more, see the CFP. We also welcome investigations of literature and health, illness narratives, and the power of story in medical humanities.

Current Call

CFP: Sickness and Health in the Era of Trump

This CFP is now CLOSED. Please look for our Winter/Spring 2018 issue in early February and our CFP for Summer 2018 in late February.

The editors of the online magazine Dósis: medical humanities + social justice — a new project of Med Hum | Daily Dose — are seeking contributors for their debut issue: “Sickness and Health in the Era of Trump.” Since January 2017 we have seen the steady erosion of our national — and international — well-being under the GOP-led government. We have also seen citizens and residents in all corners of our nation mounting a steady resistance against the erasure of progress made in the eight years of President Obama’s administration. Progress toward better access to healthcare, environmental sustainability, de-escalation of violence, and the recognition of human rights for all people living within and without our national borders. Dósis seeks essays, commentary, reviews, and visual art that speaks to both destruction and resistance in the era of Trump.

What does your research have to say about this moment in our history?

How has your work been (re)shaped by the era of Trump?

How have you, and the communities to which you belong, responded to the challenges of 2017?

Is there a scholar or activist you would like to interview about sickness and health in the era of Trump?

What works of fiction or nonfiction, film or television, do you think speak to this moment?

Pitches for essays, commentary, and reviews will be considered on a rolling basis between now and 1 November 201720 November 2017. First drafts will be due to the editor by 15 December 2017, editorial feedback will be provided by 15 January 2018 and final drafts will be due by 1 February 2018.

We also seek cover art! If you are a visual artist, or know artists whose work may speak to this theme, please submit a reference image of your work to our managing editor Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook at submissions@medhumdosis.com.

And finally, we have a Patreon! As we relaunch Dósis as a blog and web magazine dedicated to marginalized voices in the medical humanities, we are committed to paying our contributors. Patreon support will allow us to begin paying our contributors for their work while off-setting current operating costs, currently funded out of pocket by our editor-in-chief. Each successive goal in our Patreon campaign will offset a little more of our operating expenses while giving contributors a raise! We want to ensure Dósis a sustainable future.

Patreon

As we relaunch Dósis as a blog and web magazine dedicated to marginalized voices in the medical humanities, we are committed to paying our contributors. Patreon support will allow us to begin paying our contributors for their work while off-setting current operating costs, currently funded out of pocket by our editor-in-chief. Each successive goal in our Patreon campaign will off-set a little more of our operating expenses while giving contributors a raise! We want to ensure Dósis a sustainable future.

CURRENT GOAL: $150/month

When we reach an income of $150.00/month from patrons, we will be able to…

Pay our Essay contributors! $25.00/piece

Pay our Commentary contributors! $15.00/piece

Pay our Review contributors! $15.00/review

Pay 25% of Dósisoperating costs!

Read about the rest of our goals and giving tiers at our Patreon page. Become a patron of Dósis for as little as $1.00/month and help us pay our writers!